One of my biggest complaints about Camino (nee Chimera) was that I found the default theme icons in the toolbar hard to see against the pinstripe background. As of tonight, this is no longer a problem for me!

While perusing this month's Macworld, which has 75 reviews of free and low-cost software packages (humble aside: there are a few of my reviews scattered amongst the bunch, and there are some gems hidden in there, some of which will be appearing here as future PotWs, I would imagine), I stumbled across a review of ChimerIcon, which I had never heard of before. ChimerIcon (soon to be called CaminoIcon??) is a "theming" program for Camino that lets you very easily replace the splash screens and toolbar icons with any number of predefined sets ... or you can create you own theme.

Using ChimerIcon is about as easy as it can be. Just launch it, click on the Icon Themes tab, select a theme from the drop-down, and notice that the toolbar icons are now switched to those of the chosen theme. If you'd like to see all the buttons for a given theme, just click on Show Theme Icons button. If it appears the program is hung up and ignoring your input, it really isn't -- it takes it a while to display all the icons (even if you're not displaying the Show Theme Icons page, it still loads them all onto that page). Just give it a few seconds, and things will return to normal.

As long as Camino isn't running, you can then just click the Install button to put your chosen theme to work in Camino. I haven't had time to look at all 30-ish of the provided themes, but I quickly installed Orbit, my favorite Mozilla theme, and I'm now 100% happier about time spent in Camino (though I do want to browse the rest; some look quite cool). I'm not a huge fan of theming in general, but ChimerIcon is very well done, and makes it absolutely simple to give a new look to an excellent browser. The only reason it scores a 9 instead of a 10 is the slight slowdown when drawing the theme icons, but that's quibbling. ChimerIcon looks and feels professional, and the fact that it's free (including all the themes) is simply amazing.

I just installed it, and it does nothing. Literally; the window opens, and then refuses to accept any interaction apart from moving it around (the window's titlebar doesn't even move to the active state), and it even somehow manages to disable the apple menu. Too bad, 'cause it sounded sort of cool.

UPDATE: It seems to work after all. While CI it seems stuck it's actually communicating with "homepage.mac.com" according to tcpdump. Give it some time and it will become responsive and work as advertised.

I installed this program after reading the Macworld review, and it works as advertised for me. Not mentioned in this hint are the other tools by Mr. Penner which may be of interest to readers, SafarIcon, which does the same thing described in this review, only for Safari. Again, it works for me just fine. The other is CaminoKnight, which will download and install the latest nightly build of Camino for you automatically so you always have the latest and greatest (along with any bugs....) The app will archive the previous version of Camino so you can switch back should there be any problems

Well, I've using ChimerIcon since it was first released for Chimera. And as you can imagine, I tried it on the first Camino I came across. Unfortunately, it didn´t work. However, here you are what you must do to get a customized Camino look:

1) Close Camino and launch ChimerIcon to build your own personalized theme, mixing icons from other themes.

Thanks for the PotW. This is an excellent piece of software, and I believe the responsivness is much better when I'm in my office at school w/ an 802.11b connection as opposed to my dialup at home. So to those experiencing slow performance, the application has a preference option to check for updates. Turn this off to make the application much snappier when you first start it up if you have a slow connection.

I really like the auto-update feature, and the fact that it doesn't clutter my preference folder, but instead uses (properly) the application support folder.

As an aside, on a daily basis my little 1Ghz TiBook makes me happier and happier, and little additions like this make me glad I've been an Apple user for years.

Wow, I'm flattered by the pick of ChimerIcon. I think I should make a few comments about ChimerIcon and Camino. Since Chimera has changed its name to Camino, ChimerIcon will transform to CaminIcon with the next release. I will be releasing the new version in a couple of days.

ChimerIcon 0.6.3 will work just fine with Camino. There is no need to make any complicated adjustments (like the ones one poster suggested). The only thing that you have to change in ChimerIcon is the path to Camino (you do this in the Preferences tab).

Also, there is no need to move themes to CaminoKnight (CaminoKnight is an application that auto-installs the latest nightly build of Camino). CaminoKnight is "theme-aware", i.e., it will list all of your ChimerIcon themes and install your favorite theme with each nightly build.

Finally, the cron tab posted is quite useful if you wish to further automate Camino installation.

Sure, Reinhold, that's easier ;-) And that's why I tried all what you say, and more, before giving up ChimerIcon to change Camino's look. It simply didn't work, and that's the reason that I had to figure out a manual and "automaticable" method.

As for the election of CaminoKnight's folder, I thoght it was just tidier to keep all the Camino updating resources in one single place. That´s all.

Having said that, I eagerly await your CaminoIcon. As we say in Sapin, I await for it "like for May's water".

I wrote the review of ChimerIcon and ChimeraKnight for Macworld; unfortunately, the timeline of print magazines means that the reviews for the article were written before Chimera was changed to Camino. However, as Reinhold mentioned, ChimerIcon works perfectly with Camino, provided you change the path to the app from Chimera to Camino.

Nice. I tried this app out last night. Works extremely well. I've always liked Camino over Safari and the others, but have always been displeased with the look. This app does a great job of making Camino look good. Thanks for the hint!

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